For the paltry sum of $11 per hour, Ryan Wheeler's summer job is pretty good. He must be at an elementary school by 8 a.m. to help the head maintenance man have an easier summer. Wheeler does what needs to be done, including taking out the trash, mowing the lawn and adding a fresh coat of paint to the walls.

"Pretty laid back,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

Of course, that’s just the day job.

His night occupation of playing baseball this summer in the Cape Cod League has started Wheeler on a new career path, one that seemed implausible just a few months before the end of his sophomore season at Loyola Marymount and when he graduated from Torrance High in 2006.

Wheeler turned 20 on July 10 while playing for the Brewster Whitecaps at Falmouth. It was part of a season in which Wheeler made the Cape Cod League All-Star team, which included the opportunity to take batting practice at Fenway Park in Boston.

More importantly to his baseball future, Wheeler has played well in front of scouts and agents, neither of whom knew his name when he graduated from high school.

It has been his left-handed power that has opened eyes. Wheeler, who has batted cleanup for most of Brewster’s two-month long season, was batting .313 through 35 games and trying to finish strong and help Brewster make the playoffs.

But Wheeler has made his point as a prospect. He has hit five home runs and driven in 15 runs. Three of his home runs have come at his home field at Brewster.

Wheeler hit two of his home runs to right field, which is 330 feet down the lines. Another home run went to right-center, between the 380 to 395 signs.

His five home runs with a wood bat against invitation-only college pitching can be compared against the six home runs he hit as a sophomore this spring. Wheeler hit only four home runs combined in his junior and senior years at Torrance High.

“I’m a lot better,” he said. “I think I used to be too hard on myself. Coming up here, I knew a big part of it would be to keep my composure because there was going to be slumps. It comes down to maturing and not getting too high or too low and learning the game a little more.”

Maturity is nice, but the talent has to be there. In hindsight, Wheeler feels he underdeveloped his baseball talent in high school because he focused on playing basketball, where he was a teammate of North Carolina's Deon Thompson.

Wheeler said he doesn’t regret his amateur basketball career, but he now understands how it initially prohibited his professional baseball future. Despite his 6-foot-4 frame and left-handed swing, Wheeler said he was never once asked to fill out an information card by a professional scout in high school.

He went to LMU as a walk-on last year and became the regular first baseman this spring, batting .345 with 20 doubles and 45 RBIs. Wheeler still wasn’t on anyone’s radar. He was planning on playing summer baseball for a team in a non-descript league in Palm Springs, far removed from the prospect hotbeds of the Cape.

But Wheeler picked a good time to hit a home run on a Tuesday night at UC Irvine late in the college season, at a park where the ball doesn’t carry well at night. His power perked the interest of Irvine assistant Bob Macaluso, who needed a first baseman on the Cape. Wheeler found his summer job.

“The biggest change for me this season has been how much attention there has been,” Wheeler said. “Nobody wanted me out of high school. I went to LMU as a walk-on. Now there’s 10 agents and 10 scouts at every game.”

Wheeler credits several adjustments for helping accelerate his development. The first change was leaving basketball and putting that time into baseball. He said he almost quit baseball as a freshman in high school but understood by the time he was a junior that if he wanted to play a Division I sport in college, it would be baseball.

“I still wouldn’t trade the experiences I had playing with Deon,” Wheeler said. “I’d get to baseball season and I would be in running shape, but never in hitting shape. I didn’t play against very high competition in high school baseball and I think (scouts) saw a big lefty first baseman who could make contact but didn’t hit for much power. They don’t want singles from first base.”

Wheeler, who wore glasses in high school, realized that his field of vision was obscured. So with the encouragement of a teammate, he tried contact lenses and found that he could see the ball better.

Finally, there was sheer work ethic. He took advantage of the new batting cages at LMU and hit every day, before and after practice, before and after games, seven days a week.

All of that resulted in the ability to make an immediate impact for Brewster this summer. He went hitless at the All-Star game, but said he hit one ball hard. That’s all he had to do to stay on the radar.

The fringe benefit was the batting practice session at Fenway Park, for which the Red Sox host and feed the players for an afternoon, and conveniently enough, lock the gates so only their organizational soldiers have a private look at the hitters.

Wheeler got a small taste of what lies ahead if his development continues.

“It is the nicest field I’ve ever been on,” he said. “The field is also a lot bigger than it looks. I’ve been to about four games there but never been on the field. No left-handed hitters hit any balls out. I got to the warning track once. I had hit balls farther than 380 feet before, but the ball was going nowhere there. The air was heavy and thick. A few right-handers hit balls over the Green Monster, so that was cool to see. And we got to hit their baseballs for batting practice, which are brand new balls, which is really, really, rare for us.”

The pearl perk only comes at the level where the money flows.

In the meantime, Wheeler has his gig for $11 an hour at the elementary school, the sort of typical part-time jobs teams arrange for players. He said he is fortunate to have a good host family in which he has all the comforts of home. He said that he knew he was lucky this summer, because “I had heard some horror stories,” about other guys sleeping in basements and behind the bleachers of the ballpark.

His mother, Heather, has a sister in Boston who Wheeler has visited and he said both Heather and his father, Gerry, watched the All-Star game and had a chance to see him play what will probably become his summer of discovery, no matter where baseball takes him from here.

“It’s been a pretty good summer,” Wheeler said. “I can’t complain.”

The way he’s got it set up, coming home to California will be a letdown. But Wheeler would love nothing more than that head maintenance guy to he able to say, ‘Hey, Ryan Wheeler took out my trash one summer.’”